Story here
New York Times Makes Yet Another Front Page Blunder
It’s a pretty silly error and in other venues would be no big deal but it’s being treated as a BFD in this story. Is this level of reaction warranted?
It’s the Huffington Post. Now which news outlet do you trust more?
ly Ballou strikes again!
The NYT is supposed to be The Standard, so when they have a typo/misspelling in bold letters on the front page, it’s a bit of an issue.
It’s the bane of word processor spell checkers; words that sound the same but are spelled differently and have different meanings. That means no red squiggly underline.
I agree with Ranger Jeff, but I would think the problem is not indicative of the NYT so much as news (not just papers) in general. No one wants to pay for quality editors. Editors don’t effect* the bottom line - when they do their job, no one notices.
Maybe I’m just an old man ranting, but it could be a symptom of kids that grew up in the “everyone gets a trophy day” education system. They were never challenged, so when they get to actual jobs, they don’t care about quality. They never had to. They couldn’t of * done a good job it they wanted to.
*see, I need an editor.
Those kinds of errors are the stuff of editors’ nightmares.
My team once wrote up a Medicare publication for public health clinics. The front page headline was, cleverly, “Attention Public Health Clinics!” with a subhead of “New Billing Guidelines”.
Well, we wrote it up. Six people looked at the final layout. Then three members of management gave it their blessing.
And just after everything had been sent to the Post Office, someone noticed that the “l” was missing from “Public”. It’s an important letter in that word.
WRT the NYT, I assume most people wouldn’t even see the error; your brain supplies the missing letter. I don’t think it’s the end of the world, just internet outrage.
I completely disagree. I’m not “outraged” by any means, but this jumps right off the page. There’s no excuse for this not being caught.
There is it is - oy vey. Yeah, that should have been caught. I agree that major publications like The New York Times do have a higher standard than your average internet message board post.
I don’t necessarily disagree with you, but it doesn’t take a quality editor to spot that typo. Someone at the NYT missed Al Yankovic’s latest.
Regards,
Shodan
I think the typo is simply indicative of the way things are at all newspapers: dwindling money to spend on staff, including editors and copycheckers. Not so many years ago, it was rare to find a typographical error in The Rocky Mountain News and The Denver Post, my local papers. Now, the former is long gone and it’s rare to not find a typo in the Post, even though it’s got a 75% smaller page count in which to commit them.
It’s rare in* The New York Times *because it’s got a bigger, more experienced staff than most local dailies (although it’s smaller than it once was), but even The Grey Lady isn’t immune.
My bigger worry, given the way people communicate now, is how many people in the coming years are going to actually care about typos.
The second error is not necessarily indicative of anything on its own. Even the NYT occasionally makes mistakes. The first one, though, there’s no conceivable way that any editor or proofreader could have missed that… which indicates that it wasn’t proofread at all. And that is indicative of deeper problems.
You see it all the time on the Dope - new posters coming in with terrible grammar, spelling and writing skills, and when they’re called on it, their response is usually something like, “I don’t care - you understood what I meant” (except much more poorly written). The idea that accuracy is critical in writing is definitely getting lost along the way.
I’ve grown used to lesser papers having errors that would have resulted in attrition on the editorial floor in eras past - some, like the Hartford Courant, aren’t even edited locally but in a boiler room in Chicago, which means that localisms like street names and place spellings are often screwed up.
But headline and front page errors in the NYT… this is bad. Very bad.
Meh. Yes it’s wrong, and yes it should have been caught. But geez, do you realize how many headlines the NYT cranks out in any given year? Mistakes happen. Something is going to slip through every now and then. If this happened a lot it would be noteworthy. A single incident? Non-story. Move along.
The practice of everyone getting a Participation Trophy dates back to the early 80s at the very latest. They may even be older than that. So these “kids” could be 45 years old. Damn kids!
It’s not a typo: they’re talking about were-Ebola, which is where you turn into the Ebola virus during a full moon.
Don’t tell my Facebook friends. They’ll believe it.
And thus the world ends, not with a bang, but with a wimper.
Ever since people began to rely on spell checkers, no one is willing to pay the expense of proof readers any more. The result is that certain kind of errors will not be detected providing they are spelled correctly. Words like: your, you’re, there, their, two, too, to, etc. will always pass the spell check even if they are errors.
Grammar checkers remain less than perfect and so the editors of big newspapers are left with a problem. The sad thing is that most big newspapers realize they are slowly but surely being squeezed out of business and so this problem is not even very important to them compared to what they will do in future to earn a living.
It’s not really important to me either. Is it important to you?
I ask because the issue is one of cost versus benefit. Do you think it’s worth the cost to eliminate these rather trivial errors? Almost no one who uses the Internet seems to think that. In fact, on most Internet forums (like this one), when people complain about grammar and spelling errors, most other people tell them to just stop complaining and find something more important to discuss.
Seems sad but true to me. I would call it an unfortunate sign of the times.